Jonathan Shradar

Tim Keller shares some great insight into the idea of revival and how we may have been approaching it wrong for a big chunk of history. Keller also points out some means, things need for revival to take place. "The primary means-of-revival that everyone agrees upon is  extraordinary prayer .  That’s the clearest of all and so I won’t spend time on it. The second means is a  recovery of the grace-gospel .  One of the main vehicles sparking the first awakening in Northampton, Massachusetts was Edwards’ two sermons on Romans 4:5, “Justification by Faith Alone,” in November, 1734. For both John Wesley and George Whitefield, the main leaders of the British Great Awakening, it was an understanding of salvation by grace rather than moral effort that touched off personal renewal and made them agents of revival. Lloyd-Jones taught that the gospel of justification could be lost at two levels. A church might simply become heterodox and lose the very belief in justification by faith alone. B

Admit it, you, like me have wasted entirely too much time thinking of new acronyms and poster ideas that will launch us into holiness. And all that we have achieved is lame preaching on being "better" and trying harder and the realization that we fail time and time again. We don't get grace. Matt Chandler is staring this problem in the face and calling it out. "The problem as I perceive it as a Pastor is that most of those who claim to know and love God want to see sin lose its power in their lives and walk in greater intimacy with Christ; most are exhausted and have been trying to mortify sin by promises and threats rather than through the weapons grace provides. By "promises" I mean they believe that they will have life to the “full” and get a great house in heaven if they behave in this manner or that manner..." "Another very popular sport... is fighting residual sin with our own vows and resolution—these become our defense.  In the end, you a

After a three-month preaching sabbatical of sorts it was nice to open scripture at the ABIDE Assemble last night. We are launching into a series called "The Fourth Gospel" where we will spend the rest of the year working through the Gospel of John. In the sermon and in the discussion that followed we spent a lot fo time wrestling with the tension of disbelief. We have encountered an amazing, powerful God yet we are prone to allow our belief to "slip" and wane. This often happens when we are faced with life's hard situations and pain. We take broadly held but often wrong views of God and assume nothing bad should happen. That every day should be a Friday. But that is not where our hope is found. Our hope - what gives us strength and belief to endure hardship and the realities of living in a broken world is that we are "children of God" because of what Christ has done for us. When life gives us lemons we swallow hard because we know that somehow, these

Western Seminary Archdeacon, Marc Cortez has written a book about the gospel. I think it might be worth a read. Here is a short video of Marc giving you a taste of what you might read... Of course I am a younger reformed guy, so I will only read this book if it is published by Crossway (or given to me for free.) But you might need to read it no matter who publishes it.